Saturday, 9 July 2011

So God cooked up this little sting operation to tempt Adam and Eve with the fruits of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. God, that’s a mouthful. From this blatant entrapment we get ‘The Fall of Man’, ‘The Original Sin’ and all these other wonderful guilt-trips visited upon Adam’s sons. Best of all we are apparently all born into sin.

Now, it occurs to me that the only “Sin” a new-born child can be guilty of is a lack of faith, what with being born an atheist and all (prove to me that a new born believes in any gods and I’ll be happy to retract). And whilst ‘Ignorance of the law is no excuse’ is a well-tested idea, there is a lot of work being done at the moment on what age that holds true from. No matter how authoritarian the regime I’m pretty sure we won’t be sentencing babies for pooping in public (and we won’t be trying pigs for public nuisance).

The God that loves his children entraps them by making them guilty – without trial, mind you – from birth. Once the children are old enough to know the wages of sin, and fear for their mortal souls, the fact of being born into it, acts as a very strong incentive to do good… except it doesn’t because there’s this ridiculous out-clause:

Pray for forgiveness, and accept God into your life.

The thing about that, though, is it takes personal responsibility and does away with it. Then again, this is a lesson already learned from birth.

In the words of the Chemical Brothers, “I’m alive, I’m alone, and I never asked to be either of those.”

Born into a life you didn’t choose, as a sinner. Repent, and be saved. Sin, quite consciously now. Repent, and be saved. Sin some more (‘cause it was quite fun the first time). Repent, and be saved. Rinse (with holy water) and repeat.

Fortunately, most of the so-called sins from which people repent are those “sins” that don’t harm anyone – masturbation (more on that in a bit), pre-marital sex, coveting damned near anyone, etc., etc.

Unfortunately, once you’ve established a pattern of abuse of the rules it’s very easy to escalate. Take a look at prison statistics and professed religious affiliations some time.

God loves you, and proves it by making you feel bad for being brought into existence (by him).

God loves you, and shows this by making you feel bad for breaking his rules, rules that don’t make sense in the context of his own creation (masturbation and all forms of (consensual) sex are hypothesised to reduce certain cancers and improve health and reproductive ability*).